Structured Query Language (“SQL”) is a special-purpose programming language having a defined set of instructions that is useful for interacting with most relational database management systems (“RDBMS”), for example, to update or retrieve data from a database. SQL is a standard programming language as recognized by the American National Standards Institute (“ANSI”) and the International Organization for Standardization (“ISO”).
Despite its status as a standard programming language, the implementation of SQL code is not completely interchangeable among different database systems. Further, many different database system vendors do not strictly adhere to the standard, for example, by adding proprietary extensions in order to enhance the functionality of the standard SQL commands. This can create problems when a customer transitions from one database to another database.